In the Deck Box #7: Oona, Queen of the Fae

Hey guys! Gyula here. I'm part of the Bramble On group and I play test Magic/hang out with David, Jav, C.J., and Evan quite frequently. Today, David asked me to share with you a particular deck I've been building to play in our EDH playgroup. This deck has gone through many forms but I think I finally found a nice niche of cards I enjoy playing. I've never written an article before, so I hope you guys enjoy the discussion about none other than Oona, Queen of the Fae.

Let me give you guys a little backstory about myself and Magic. I started out playing Commander with a deck I fondly remember, but recently gutted for cards, Dromar, the Banisher. I ended up getting bored with the particular play style after several months and decided to rip it apart and evolve the deck with a new general. After looking at different options, I came across Oona; and she looked like an incredible general and quickly became one of my favorite cards. I decided to drop White in favor of Black and Blue and tackle this monster of a general. I'll admit, the start was very shaky. It took me almost 4-5 months to complete the first draft and it completely fell apart. I tried to do too much and fell into the trap of just playing the best cards in my general's colors, so my deck lost a ton of synergy. My deck also lacked strong development to give me more resiliency as the longer multiplayer games dragged on. Then one fated day at my local card shop, I was playing a game of Commander with C.J., Jav, and Evan and a random player who brought Crosis, the Purger to the table. The Crosis deck was really interesting and ran a psuedo-mill/group-hug strategy that allowed everyone to draw cards with artifacts like Howling Mine and Font of Mythos along with some artifacts to make copies of them like Sculpting Steel and Mizzium Transreliquat, so players would be drawing 2, 3, maybe even 5 cards a turn. He also ran cards that profited from all the card draw with Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind, Kederekt Parasite, and Psychosis Crawler as win conditions. After seeing this strategy, I rejoiced. I found the play style Oona wanted me to play. Mind you, I was only able to test this deck a hand full of times, but I really enjoy it now. To see the deck list, click HERE!

What is the theme to my deck? Milling and drawing tons of cards. I force everyone to draw more cards than they should while Milling or Exiling the rest of their library. Interestingly enough, cards like Kami of the Crescent Moon and Forced Fruition are strange inclusions, but double up in my strategy. While reducing the size of your opponents' library every turn and forcing them to draw cards, it makes some of their cards dead draws, namely one the cards that draw them more cards. I can also turn all that card draw against them with cards like Jace's Archivist and Windfall to make my opponents mill even more cards from their library. Brilliant! Finally, the strategy also interrupts strategies that rely off the top card of opponents' libraries (cough* Intet cough*). My set-up often throws off my opponents' set-up but at a steep price. While I'm reducing the size of their libraries, I'm also allowing my opponents to dig deeper for extra cards that they can use against me and interrupt my strategy. It also fills up opponents' graveyards, helping fuel reanimation strategies and making me really weak to Living Death. >_<. That's why I included a ton of removal in Oona, including Evacuation, Capsize, Damnation, and plenty of countermagic. This attrition style of play is necessary to keep opponents from beating me in the face with a mottly crew of giant creatures.

Now that your opponent's cards are flooding the graveyard, how do you use that to your advantage? Cards like Undead Alchemist, Puppeteer Clique, Geth, Lord of the Vault, Body Double, and even Havengul Lich allow you to take their creatures right out from under your opponents' noses, which allows me to generate tons of variation that Blue and Black largely lack. When I was building Oona, I had thought about how I wanted to play the deck, so I thought to myself 'what do faeries do?' They play tricks! So why not steal things from graveyards, from the battlefield or even from opponents' decks? Cards like Bribery, Clone, Sower of Temptation, you can use opponents' creatures to defend yourself while you setup your draw engines. Once you have all these creatures and you're done using them, you can use Altar of Dementia to turn them into more cards milled off the top of opponents' libraries. Coincidentally, I have one infinite combo with the Altar, Puppeteer Clique and Mikaeus, the Unhallowed, just in case.

Ok, the early game setup makes sense, but how do you keep up the tempo in the late game? Cards like Keening Stone and Mesmeric Orb do just that. The more players commit to the board and tap their lands to cast spells, the Orb punishes them for it and the more I mill opponents out, the Keening Stone cleans up for the kill. Unfortunately, these two cards draw a ton of hate, so I use cards like No Mercy and Dread to dissuade my opponents from attacking me like hungry hungry hippos and buys me enough time to mill them out. Since Mesmeric Orb punishes me too, I'm considering running Feldon's Cane or Elixir of Immortality.. more testing to come!

So, in order to pull this strategy off, you need a lot of board control and tutors to give you some consistency to get the right type of removal or milling engine. I hope you all enjoyed my rant about my Oona EDH deck and how it works. It will continue to evolve as I test it, but for now, I'm really happy with how it works.

Want to check out other EDH/Commander decks? Check out the In the Deck Box Series on the MTG Casual Network Archive!

-Gyula Goreczky

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